Bashscripts.org

I have a useradd bash script which requests the user enter an e-mail address for the user being created. This is so the user receives his username/password in an e-mail when his/her account is created.

Currently this part of the code is very simple:

echo Enter the users e-mail address
read ADDRESS

What i'm finding is that sometimes when the operators run the script they are entereing blank information. How can I put a if statement in place that enforces they enter an e-mail address format.

I tried the following code but it doesn't work. The idea was to at least verify they are using the @ symbol.

string=@
if [[ $string != "@" ]] ; then
echo You have entered an invalid e-mail address!
exit 1
else
do something

Hi,

Actually, an e-mail address can contains other characters than letters and numbers (according to RFC 2822, RFC 5321, and RFC 5322) and there are a bunch of restrictions. It'd therefore be very complicated to provide a good and efficient regular expression to validate one.

Anyway, what you want to do is checking whether the string entered contains a @ symbol, and your approach was correct, except that you forgot to put globs around the expression.



Also, you can re-prompt:

Interesting link on validating emails with regex: http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html



That would validate about 99% of valid emails in use today as valid.

Also, check out those links:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html
http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i ... til-i.aspx

@crouse:
Don't quote the regex or it'll be evaluated as a string. And it's better to use a variable ( e.g. « if [[ $email =~ $re ]]; then » ).

You are correct, I removed the quotes... ty.